


Solace

by CharmingProcrastinator



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: All The Tropes, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, POV Karen Page, plus a dog, with a side of humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-06-26 09:36:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19765492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharmingProcrastinator/pseuds/CharmingProcrastinator
Summary: Karen reflects on how Frank came back to her, in their after.





	1. Chapter 1

_Karen wakes up to an empty bed… as she knew she would. She rolls over to shut her alarm, then scoots up to Frank’s side of the bed to bury her face in his pillow and breathe in his scent, wondering how long it would be this time before she got to breathe it from his neck again… Could be days, could be weeks, could even be months._

_Please let it not be months._

_A whine from Max comes to save her from maudlin, reminding her that she was not going to be the only one missing Frank until he returned._ _She fills the pit bull’s bowl, then walked over to the kitchen, finding the coffee beans already ground and waiting in the filter, and the water already measured in the reservoir. Karen smiles as she flicks on the coffee maker._

_Their after was a series of stolen moments, of tiny gestures peppered here and there to show her that he loved her, and thought of her, even as he had to leave her to satisfy his blood lust. To “be what he needed to be,” as he had once put it._

\----

It had started like this: months after the hospital, weeks after she had given up on ever seeing Frank again, and days after Nelson, Murdock and Page had been able to move into an office space that was not situated above a butcher shop, Karen had decided to adopt a dog.

Frank’s rejection of her in order to commit to a never-ending war had plunged her into a deep melancholy that she fought against by burying herself in her work, until she one day actually ran out of work. Oh, she knew it wouldn’t last, she’d have new business soon enough. She tried to keep busy by stepping back into her office manager shoes, but only gingerly, as she really didn’t want the boys to expect her to fall back into that role full-time.

But coming home to her empty apartment at night hurt. There was no other way to put it. Karen Page was alone, which, as a vicious voice inside her head would whisper to her in her darkest moments, was no more than she deserved.

She’d always wanted a dog, but realistically had never had the time for one. Now, however, while she still was a complete workaholic, she at least made her own hours and could work from home whenever she pleased. Plus, with Nelson, Murdock and Page no longer operating above a butcher shop full of odours too tantalizing for a dog, she could even bring her furry friend in the office if need be.

She had checked with her partners whether they’d be okay with her bringing a dog to their place of work, not missing how they’d readily agreed, reacting with a strange mix of surprise and elation at the news that she wanted to get a dog. Surprise, because apparently, even those closest to her assumed she was a cat person, for some reason. Elation that she seemed to want to get a life outside of the office, because Foggy and Matt had been worried about her, seeing her seemingly set on working herself to death since the day she left the hospital, heartbroken and defeated.

She hadn’t told them that she had been to see Frank that day, that she had helped him escape once again. If they suspected that her sad demeanour had anything to do with the Punisher, they didn’t say anything. In no mood for lectures, she wasn’t about to let them know either. After all, other than the two of them, she had managed to lose all the men she had loved in her life, in any capacity; either they died because of her, or they sent her packing. What if confessing her feelings for Frank, admitting that she had been ready to run away with him if he’d only asked, proved to be the last straw for Matt and Foggy? She couldn’t even think what she’d do if they turned their backs on her at this point. It might just kill her.

So she made her way to a shelter, where she met Max. He was a pit bull with the friendliest disposition, despite the many scars she could see lining his fur. She felt an immediate kinship with him; he bore as many scars on the outside as she did on the inside. She almost felt as though, if she counted them, they’d come up to the same number: one for her mom, one for Kevin, one from being banished from her dad’s life, one for poor Daniel from Union Allied, one for Ben, one for each of her fallen colleagues at the Bulletin, one for Ellison firing her, one for Matt disappearing… and one for Frank, telling her to walk away, one final time.

Still, she came back to shelter to visit him two more times before taking him home with her. The volunteers assured her that, despite whatever trauma Max had been through to acquire his scars, he was a sweet, docile dog. She picked him up on a Friday afternoon. By Saturday afternoon, he was looking at her as if she hung the moon. By Sunday night, Karen reciprocated in full.

Matt and Foggy were a bit shocked when she’d shown up to work with Max in tow on Monday morning.

“Jesus, Karen, I thought you said you were getting a dog, not a gargoyle,” said Foggy, before apologizing when he saw how very not amused Karen was by his quip.

“Did you think I was going to show up with a yappy little thing to carry around in my purse?”

“No, no… But you gotta admit, that is one mean looking dog.”

Karen caressed Max’s head fondly. “Maybe. But he is the sweetest puppy, aren’t you boy?”

Max barked in answer, and like that, he became a fixture in their office, and the best part of her life.

All in all, Max was doing wonders for Karen’s mood, which may have made Frank Castle’s sudden resurgence in her life an even bigger punch in the gut.

He showed up on her fire escape one night, rapping politely against the window, and scaring the living shit out of her. Max looked up from his bowl of food for a second, then got back to it as if the Punisher was not looming right outside, more concerned with his meal than with keeping Karen safe from strange men who apparently had forgotten how to use a door.

“Some guard dog you are,” she muttered, before opening the window.

“What the fuck, Frank?” she said, opening the window to let him in, heart still beating wildly from the shock.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to risk being seen at your…” Frank never got to finish his sentence because, at the sound of his voice, Max lost his shit.

The dog ran to Frank with excited barks, jumping up and down, trying to give the man big sloppy puppy kisses in the face. Frank froze for a second, then petted the excited Max, crouching down to get a better look at him under Karen’s bewildered stare.

“Hey… Hey I know this dog! I rescued him from the Kitchen Irish…”

It took a few more moments for Max’s excitement to abate a bit, before Frank could continue.

“He’s a good dog, always wondered what happened to him after I got caught…”

Years later, Karen would still cringe with embarrassment at her reaction in that moment: seeing Max and Frank so happy to be reunited had sent a wave of irrational panic through her ( _all the men in her life_ …), which prompted her to blurt out “You’re not taking my dog! I won’t let… I can’t…”

Frank looked up at her with no small amount of confusion. Max must also have felt her distress because he immediately turned away from Frank and came to her, letting out a small concerned whine.

She bent down to hug him, hiding her face in his fur. She was completely overwhelmed right now. Frank’s appearance had reopened all the wounds that were just beginning to heal around her heart, and finding out that, somehow, fate thought it would be funny to give Karen a dog that had once belonged to the man she loved, but who could not love her back, was just too much to take.

« Are you… Karen, are you okay? »

Karen took a deep breath, feeling mortified about her stupid breakdown. Of course, Frank wasn’t here to take her dog away. What the hell was wrong with her?

“Yeah, sorry, it’s just been a rough year… I may have lost a few marbles along the way,” she joked lamely, trying to save face in some small measure.

Frank just kept staring at her and Max, seemingly lost for words. Like he wasn’t the one that had decided to just pop by out of the blue, months after telling her to walk away from him and to not look back.

“So what is it you need?” she asked, curtly, suddenly quite annoyed with him now that the double shock of seeing Frank and finding out that he apparently had a history with her dog had abated. “I’m assuming this isn’t a social call.”

Then the weirdest thing happened. Frank Castle stammered. Like _she_ was making him nervous.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay… You’re not writing for the Bulletin anymore… I thought maybe you were on vacation, but then, after a while, I got worried…”

“I got fired. Months ago. It’s a long story…”

She didn’t elaborate. Looking at him hurt. It hurt so bad. She’d been kidding herself thinking she was finally starting to get over him. She was used to his absence, it’s not as if he had ever been a constant in her life, but she was not used to the hopelessness she now felt around him. Seeing him in her apartment like this, injury free, looking so much better than the last two times she had seen him and not being able to touch him the way she longed to was just too much.

She wanted him to leave and she wanted him to stay in equal measure.

He stared at her silently for a beat. And then he just went to her kitchen, opened her fridge, grabbed two beers, then walked on over to her.

“Talk,” he said, handing her one beer and making himself at home on the couch.

And just like that, Karen caved, like she always did when it came to Frank, and let him back into her life, hoping she would not shatter completely when he inevitably left her behind again.

Karen had woken up on her couch the following day. She had apparently dozed off sometime after explaining her new job at Nelson, Murdock and Page. She found the empty beer bottles by the sink, rinsed, and a note left of the counter.

_Didn’t want to wake you up. Can’t risk being seen around these parts in daylight._

But under the message was something new, something that sparked a hope in Karen’s heart (whether said hope was welcome or not was a whole other matter) – his phone number.

She didn’t call it. She wouldn’t. She still had her pride. But knowing that he wanted her to have it? That he maybe wasn’t just about to disappear on her again? It meant something. It meant a lot.

After that, Frank came and went. He’d fall into step with her as she walked home after pulling another late night. Checking in. He fixed her leaky faucet when she complained her landlord was dodging her phone calls, something she told herself any good friend with his handyman skills would do. She was determined not to read more into it.

She got to help him too, sometimes, like the time he asked her to take out some stitches he couldn’t reach on his shoulder blade (she didn’t ask who had stitched him up in the first place, too busy trying not to gawk at his myriad of scars and not to drool at the sheer bulk of his muscles… apparently “concerned lust” was an emotion Karen was capable of feeling. Christ, she needed to get laid).

It might be petty, but she feels slightly vindicated when he seems affected by her light touches after she inspects her work, her breath no doubt tickling his back. Why should she be the only one to suffer from having to resist this pull that she has always felt between them?

He may not want to choose to love her, but if he has a few non-platonic thoughts about her tonight, well that’s only fair, given how deeply he burrowed himself under her skin while simultaneously keeping her at arm’s length.

They don’t talk about what he does that has him coming to her bruised, with stitches that need to be removed. They don’t need to. She may not write the news anymore, but she still keeps up with it. She can recognize the Punisher’s handy work better than anyone else.

June hits, and Karen is feeling lighter, for the most part. She enjoys wearing sun dresses that swish playfully around her hips and she takes Max on extended walks, celebrating the return of summer before July rolls over and the city gets too muggy. But one night, on her way home, she starts feeling… watched. She has no way to explain why, she has no proof that anyone is following her, no reason to even think it. Just a gut feeling. It’s a bit unsettling, but she tells herself she’s probably being paranoid, and if she isn’t, then she is armed, and almost never without Max, who may be a big softie, but certainly does not look like one (seriously, a lot of people give her a wide berth when she walks him… she’d feel bad, but seeing men who might otherwise be threatening by their sheer size and macho alpha male bullshit energy move out her way was certainly satisfying).

A few days later, the feeling still hasn’t left, though. And Karen knows better than to ignore her gut completely. She also knows better than to let her pride prevent her from asking for some help. She has survived so much she shouldn’t have. Her luck, if you can call it that, can’t hold out forever. And it’s not like she’d be asking a random man for protection, just because he happens to be male. She has not one, but two vigilantes in her life with skills she couldn’t ever possibly match. Question is, who to ask? Whoever tries to help her figure out if she has a stalker risks exposing himself, and she would hate to endanger either one of them like that.

The choice ends up being made for her, one unbearably hot night. She’s home, she’s just flicked on her coffee maker and is about to make herself a sandwich for dinner when lightning and the sound of thunder announce the welcome arrival of a storm to break the oppressive humidity in the air. Max runs to her room and crawls under the bed as the downpour starts, and Karen is about to grab some ham to try to coax her dog out of hiding when the familiar silhouette of one very soaked Frank Castle appears at her window.

She lets him in and is about to tease him about getting her floor all wet when she realizes something is wrong. His eyes are looking wild, and there’s blood mixed with the rain water dripping down the side of his arm.

“Frank, Jesus, what’s going on?”

“You had a stalker,” he croaks, as he walks by her and heads to her entrance door.

She’s about to ask where he thinks he’s going when she catches on.

“Had?”

Frank doesn’t answer, seemingly too absorbed by his inspections of her front door locks, shoulders as tense as she’s ever seen them.

“Frank!” she calls, as she goes to him. She almost asks him what he means by “had”, but she stops herself; why ask such a stupid question, let alone one that she already knows the answer to? She shrugs off the little voice inside her that weakly questions her lack of emotion at the news that he killed some stranger because of her. That he killed for her. Karen knows she should care, that it should bother her. It doesn’t. The hospital was months ago, but her feelings for him, about him, have not changed, no matter how much Frank might wish they would. They probably never will.

She gingerly puts her hand on his shoulder, gently urging him to turn towards her. He doesn’t, but he does stop fiddling with her locks.

“Frank, your arm… You’re bleeding,” she says softly.

Finally, he turns around, and when their eyes meet, he swallows hard, still not acknowledging his injury. Her heart is suddenly beating so hard, she is convinced that without the sounds of thunder and torrential rain outside, he’d be able to hear it.

“He had knives… A shit load of them, Karen, he was going… He would have…”

“Hey, hey, Frank, it’s okay, I’m okay, you stopped him, okay,” she replies in an effort to soothe him. “Please Frank, let’s get you dry, okay, let me take a look at that cut.”

Her hand leaves his shoulder in a single caress downward along his uninjured arm. She means it to be reassuring, but he inhales sharply through his nose, and something shifts in the air. She feels a powerful flutter deep in her belly, and she suppresses a shudder of desire that wants to take over her body. _Now is not the time,_ she chides herself.

His eyes still on her, he reaches for the hem of his soaked t-shirt, and starts lifting it up, pulling it over his head. When it’s off, Karen pries it from his wrists, using the soaked fabric to wipe gently at his bleeding arm, Frank’s stare never leaving her face.

The cut is fairly long, but shallow. He’s definitely seen worse.

“It’s not too bad… Shouldn’t need stitches,” she whispers, looking up to meet his eyes. She wants to make a quip about it being just a flesh wound to break the tension, but she finds she’s suddenly lost her voice.

She notices that Frank is breathing hard, and her own breath quickens when he leans to put his forehead against hers. She lets herself close her eyes, indulging in this, the most intimate gesture they ever shared, while telling herself that he probably just needs to reassure himself that she’s okay, and nothing more.

Her phone suddenly starts ringing, wrenching them from their peaceful moment, and Karen reluctantly pulls away, both irritated at the interruption and glad for the excuse to withdraw before she can make a fool of herself.

“I should get that,” she murmurs, turning away from him to head towards the table where she left her phone, when Frank stops her by taking a hold of her wrist.

“I… I think we danced around this thing long enough, don’t you?” he rumbles, gently turning her around to face him again.

And she has no answer to this. Her breath quickens as he lets go of her wrist to run his hand through her hair, cupping the base of her skull.

She holds his stare, but she doesn’t move. She needs him to be the one to make the first move.

And oh, dear god, he does. He finally brings his lips to hers tentatively. Once. Twice. And Karen, well Karen is only human, and she just explodes with hunger. She slides both her hands in his hair and pours everything she’s been feeling for him into her kiss, her desire, her longing, her frustration, her love… And Frank is responding in kind, taking everything she’s giving him like he is as starved for her as she is for him. It’s intoxicating, to say the least.

Frank’s hands are everywhere, and when one of them brushes against the side of her breast, she feels like she’s going to lose her damn mind if they don’t both lose their clothes soon.

Karen’s own hands leave Frank’s hair to slide down his back, and she dips one inside the back of his jeans while giving a sharp yank on his belt with the other to bring his pelvis against hers. Her boldness pays off, as Frank makes some sort of growling sound and she suddenly finds herself pinned against the wall, his hardness pressing against her hip.

It’s over only minutes later, her panties ripped and discarded somewhere over Frank’s shoulder, his pants around his ankles, his hand still holding up the thigh she had wrapped around his waist. Karen had come shockingly fast, but he had followed almost immediately after her, so she really had no reason to feel embarrassed. She even felt a little smug, to be honest. And she most definitely wanted to do it all over again.

Frank’s forehead was once again pressed against hers, his eyes closed, and they were both still panting. They had to move, the one leg she was standing on was getting tired, but Karen didn’t want to break the spell, didn’t know what to say…

And what is there to say after such an intense experience, such an explosion after months, after _years_ of restraint? There are simply no words, except those that she must swallow back down for fear of scaring him away once more ( _I love you, please stay, always_ ).

As it turns out, a gurgling sound from her coffee maker and the enticing smell from the pot she had just started when Frank showed up gives her the perfect opportunity to skip any potential post-coital disentanglement awkwardness.

“Coffee?” she suggests. Frank’s answering snort against her neck tickles, making her giggle in turn.

“Yeah. Coffee’d be great.”

Coffee turned into a memorable weekend that was comprised mainly of long conversations punctuated by amazing sex. They christened every room and just about every surface of Karen’s apartment, talked for hours in between, only deviating from these two activities to sleep, or when Karen had to step out to go walk Max and grab some food at the same time.

They talked about how Frank had spotted and gotten the drop on her stalker while he himself was doing his own brand of stalking (i.e. checking up on her to make sure she was getting home okay at night). He gave no more details, and she didn’t ask for them, more intent on conveying to him that this was proof she was safer with him than without him. With a degree of detachment she hadn’t known she was capable of, Karen thought that she ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth: she was minus one knife-wielding stalker, and plus one half-naked Frank Castle in her arms, which was as good an outcome as she could have hoped for, really.

They talk about Amy, about where he’d been all those months before he came back into town… Which leads them to talk about this woman he spent the night with… Intellectually, she knows she has no right to be jealous, so she tries to pretend she isn’t upset by this, but this is Frank. He can tell. And though he has done nothing wrong, he still begs for her forgiveness, and she is powerless to refuse it, especially when he starts kissing his way down her body while holding her stare until soul-melting pleasure forces her to throw her head back and close her eyes, blinded by stars.

She tells him about her greatest sin. She tells him about Kevin, about being a drug addict with a really shitty taste in boyfriends. She tells him this while they’re lying in her bed, her back to him, too shamed to let him see her face as she recounts how she killed her baby brother _. This is it_ , she thought… _If he’s going to walk away from me for good, it will be because of this…_

But he doesn’t pull away, he listens, then bends his head down to kiss between her shoulder blades, before turning her over to look into her eyes. He doesn’t utter a word, but his eyes say it all. It doesn’t change how he feels about her any more than his actions as the Punisher changed how she feels about him.

They talk about Maria and the kids, they talk about Billy and Curtis, about Madani and Micro, about Matt and Foggy.

They talk about Max, who revels in having another human around to pet him and give him treats.

It’s as if the outside world ceases to exist for 48 hours. It’s magical.

But all good things must come to an end. Sunday night finds them eating a pasta dish improvised with leftovers and drinking cheap wine in their underwear (the July heat is only half to blame for their state of undress… She enjoys ogling him, and he can be very rough with her clothing when he wants to take it off her, so really, they’re just being practical here).

She has to work tomorrow morning. He has to go back to his… punishing, or whatever. He’ll be leaving before dawn. 4 am is one of the safest times for him to move about, and that’s when he’ll leave the comfort of Karen’s apartment. They don’t know yet how they’re going to make this work. They only know there is no running away from this, not anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

_Karen exits the shower, dries herself with one of her fluffiest towels. Frank left his clipper and razor on the vanity, which is unusual, neat freak that he is. Karen puts them away. Frank shaving his beard always brings out complicated feelings. On the one hand, it signals his impending departure. On the other, hello jaw line. She likes him both ways, bearded and not. The switch from the former to the latter, not so much… but this is the cost of loving Frank Castle, the plight of the “desert woman”. It’s a small price to pay for the precious moments of happiness his presence, fleeting as it sometimes can be, brings her._

_\-----_

The first time Karen wakes up after Frank sneaks out, she only feels a slight twinge. She’ll miss him, but he’s hers now. He’ll be back… It’s not a question of if, just of when. So she takes a deep breath, and starts her day… she might have a hickey or two to cover up.

The afternoon brings unexpected news. Karen knows she should have seen it coming, but she’s still in a daze over her weekend long sex marathon with Frank. In the morning, she’s deliciously sore, and can’t stop daydreaming about the next time he’ll come to her. She gets giddy one minute, forlorn the next. She runs her fingers over her carefully covered hickeys, thinking Frank Castle has definitely ruined her for any other man. Then she gets annoyed with herself for mooning over a man like that, never mind one that happens to be a murder happy vigilante no doubt destined for an early and violent death. Whom she loves... and who is really, _really_ good in bed. And so the mooning cycle begins again.

By lunch, Matt and Foggy know something is up, but she manages to dodge their questions, redirecting their attention elsewhere. She can’t tell them, not yet. Maybe not ever. But she also knows she can’t lie. Even if Matt wasn’t a human lie detector, she just couldn’t lie to either one of them. Not after all that they’ve been through, and how hard they all worked to find their way back to each other, back to this partnership of equals. To becoming a family. But she’s still terrified of their reaction. So avoidance it is for the time being.

But then comes the perfect distraction. A shocking one that manages to make Foggy and Matt forget all about Karen’s strange behaviour. Brett Mahoney shows up in their office, a few uniformed officers in tow. Karen’s heart drops, but before she can conjure up any number of catastrophic scenarios involving Frank being in custody, or Fisk being released, or any other world-ending disaster, the detective goes straight to the point: Benjamin Poindexter was found dead in a dumpster a few blocks away from Karen’s apartment. He was armed to the teeth with knives, yet an unknown assailant managed to get close enough to get a few hits in before shooting him in the head.

How on earth Poindexter managed to walk with a broken spine, let alone escape custody is a mystery. Who managed to best him is also a mystery – to all but Karen, that is. The room starts spinning. Benjamin Poindexter was her stalker. Of course. He was going to kill her. And Frank stopped him, escaping with nothing more than a cut along his arm, proving that the man has more lives than a cat.

Karen runs to the bathroom and loses her lunch. Foggy comes in to check up on her, wets a few paper towels for her to lay across her forehead. They all think it’s Poindexter’s proximity to her place that has her upset, and that is partially true. But it’s also the thought of how close she came to losing Frank for good. She knows what that psycho was capable of, how he bested Matt on a few occasions with his uncanny aim. She knows that, not matter what a force of nature the Punisher is, his getting away unscathed is probably solely due to having the element of surprise on his side. Poindexter was on his way to kill her that night, she has no doubt about it. It seems that she too has more lives than a cat. _Karen Page and Frank Castle_ , she muses, _a match made somewhere in hell_.

She drinks the water offered to her by Foggy, answers Mahoney’s questions about her whereabouts on Friday night and over the weekend, while Matt sits by her side, rubbing his hand between her shoulder blades in a comforting way. Max, lays his head on her knee, and she finally feels in control of herself again. She doesn’t have to lie: she was at home, heard no gunshots of any kind at any point over the weekend, had not received any threats lately, had no clue Poindexter had escaped detention. She doesn’t mention feeling watched. Doesn’t see what that would accomplish at this point.

When Frank comes back a week later, she hugs him too hard and too long. He doesn’t question why, just lets her do what she needs to do. Words are seldom necessary between them in these kinds of moments.

Time passes. Frank comes and goes. They slowly figure out a system. Frank has a few caches full of weapons and money all over the city. A few of them have an army cot and a shower, and he alternates locations during his punishing sprees. The rest of the time, he spends at Karen’s. He cooks for her, lectures her about how little the sparse content of her fridge gives him to work with. Sometimes, they walk Max late at night and Karen gets them dinner from a food truck, which they eat sitting on dark park bench. Their version of date night.

Matt and Foggy figure out she’s seeing someone pretty quickly. They badger her about it, ask to meet her mystery man to make sure he is good enough for their favourite gal. Karen demurs at first, trying to figure out what to tell them. She’s not ready to fess up to them, not ready to admit that she is in love with a mass murderer, and that she and Frank have pretty much shacked up, at least during the periods he’s laying low. But she doesn’t want to make up lies either. So over beers one night, she draws a line in the sand, trying to close the subject for a little while:

“I’m not ready to talk about it, OK? It’s complicated… and it’s private.”

“Oh no. He’s married, isn’t he? Please Karen, tell me you’re not seeing a married man!” pleads Foggy.

Karen pushes at his shoulder.

“No! Of course not! Christ, Foggy, who do you take me for?”

“Then I just don’t understand what’s the big deal. Why don’t you want us meeting this guy? It _is_ a guy, right?”

“It’s a guy!” Karen and Matt reply in unison.

“Wait, how do _you_ know for sure it’s a guy?” Karen asks, both amused and vaguely anxious.

Matt has the good sense to look a bit uncomfortable as he drops a bit of information that hits Karen like a bombshell.

“I, uh… I can smell him on you. Smell a man on you.”

Karen takes a few long pulls of her beer at that, trying to mask her own discomfort. This makes sense, of course. That it wouldn’t be just his ears who are crazy attuned. But it’s still a bit mortifying that he can tell so much by the way she smells. She quells the wave of anger that wants to take over her when she realizes just to what degree he must have known how much she had wanted him all those years ago. She wants to take the higher road, but she’s feeling something way too close to the sting of humiliation she had felt when he had confessed he was Daredevil. So she opts for brutal honesty:

“That’s really fucked up, Matt.”

“I know,” he sighs, and he looks so utterly resigned, that all at once, all the fight goes out of her. It’s too obvious Matt wishes that he didn’t have to know all these intimate, private details about his friends’ lives.

“This calls for another round. My treat,” she says in the guise of an olive branch.

They end up getting utterly shitfaced. Frank makes no comments when she stumbles home smelling like the bottom of a keg that night, but he spends the next morning torturing her through her hangover by making extensive use of the loudest appliance in her kitchen. She didn’t even know she owned a blender. She tells him so as he hands her a smoothie he made her (or as he insists on calling it, a hangover remedy, but nothing in this world will convince Karen that he didn’t invent this supposed cure to amuse himself at her expense).

“What on her earth did I do to incur the wrath of the Punisher?” she moans dramatically when he decides to make himself a shake of his own. “Seriously, do you torture all your marks like this before you put them down?”

Frank stills at that, and for a moment, Karen thinks she’s gone too far.

“Did you just joke about what I do?” he asks, and she cannot pin his tone.

Karen sighs. “I guess I did.”

“Is that something we do, now?”

“I guess it is…”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Karen would smile, but moving her face makes her entire skull ache, so she just takes a sip from her hangover remedy that is so totally a punishment smoothie. It’s actually quite tasty.

And that’s just how it is between them. It’s insane how easy their shared life is together, how well they fit together. As much as she loves Frank, Karen has to admit that in the early days, when they were fucking like bunnies over just about every piece of furniture she owned, she sometimes feared that once they were finished making up for years of restraint and unresolved tension, they might flame out and find out they had nothing in common. But now she knows that they have more in common than just those sad horrible things that had drawn them to each other in the beginning.

They’re both avid readers, for one. Their tastes in literature don’t perfectly align, but they both enjoy relaxing together with a book, sitting propped up on opposite sides of the couch, feet tangled together. Neither one cares for TV all that much. Her work experience both at the Bulletin and with Foggy and Matt makes it impossible for her to watch procedurals (too unrealistic), and Frank feels the same about any show (or movie for that matter) with action and fight scenes. When they do watch something together, it’s usually classic movies, oldies. Frank tells her Maria used to like them too, and Karen smiles at him, always grateful when he shares a bit more of himself, of his life before, with her. She likes that some of their life together calls back to some happy memories of his previous life.

They have a similar sense of humour. Karen doesn’t really remember what it is she had said to trigger it, but she will always remember the first time she heard and saw Frank laugh a full-blown laugh. _I did this,_ she thinks. _I put that smile there._ One night, he walks into the room while Karen is enjoying one of her few televised guilty pleasures, Dr. Pimple Popper, and then, Frank fucking Castle, the Punisher, the scourge of Hell’s Kitchen, the man that makes the criminal underworld tremble has to turn away from the screen, and starts grumbling about “what the hell kind of disgusting shit are you watching, Karen?” And Karen loses it. She laughs so hard, there are tears in her eyes and she slides off the couch.

“What the hell is so funny?” he asks, still keeping his back to the screen.

“You... you just turned green,” she manages to get out between fits of laughter.

“Well, that shit is gross,” he grumps.

Karen can’t stop laughing long enough to string a proper sentence together, but she finally manages to get out a few words “Meat hooks! You…. You once put… mobsters on… meat… hooks… but you can’t deal with… oh… oh, shit my belly hurts.”

Before she can react (not that she could fight back much, still laughing uncontrollably), Frank picks her up from the floor, throws her over his shoulder and carries her over to the bedroom before dropping her on the bed and covering her body with his. Pretty soon, she’s too distracted to laugh anymore.

It’s not all sunshine and daisies, of course. While Frank has given in to the feelings he has for her, he still has moments where he tries to convince Karen she should show him the door, keeps telling her she deserves better than him. And she keeps telling him that he’s an idiot, that she’s happier than she’s been for a long time. Since her mother died, really. When she finally convinces Frank to stop beating himself up for putting her through all this, for not being able to just be content living a quiet life by her side, for getting restless and needing to leave her in order to make way for the Punisher, it’s through a book of all things. She gives him her copy of The Alchemist, in which she has underlined one of Fatima’s lines:

_I'm a desert woman, and I'm proud of that. I want my husband to wander as free as the wind that shapes the dunes. And, if I have to, I will accept the fact that he has become a part of the clouds, and the animals and the water of the desert._

He reads it and looks at her dubiously. But he stops trying to convince her to dump his ass.

Of course, living by Fatima’s philosophy is not always easy, and Karen’s nerves do have their limits. When Frank leaves, he’s sometimes gone for weeks at a time without giving any sign of life (too dangerous to communicate, he says.). Sometimes, when he comes back, he is beat to hell and spends days laid up in bed recovering from a multitude of injuries. The third time he comes back in a messed up state after a month of radio silence, Karen puts her foot down. They need a way for him to communicate with her, to let her know he’s okay every once in a while, but mostly so he can tell her if he’s seriously injured and needs her to send some help. Curtis agrees with her (prompting Frank to grumble about how he should never have introduced them to each other). Frank eventually relents and reaches out to David Lieberman, and together, the four of them hatch up a communication plan.

Karen gets a burner that Frank will call from whatever burner of his own he’s using. No names should ever be used. Text messages must be sent in code. They keep it simple. 10/10 is I’m fine. 911 is send help, and should be accompanied by a set of coordinates. They also have a code for Karen to text if, for any reason, it’s not safe for Frank to come over to her place. Micro beefs up the security on Karen’s laptop, making sure it will get completely wiped if someone tries to break into it. Frank is given a laptop of his own with an untraceable IP. Micro also sets them up with new email addresses from a secure server, to allow for more detailed communications, if need be.

All this works to alleviate some of her stress, but can’t make up for how much she misses him when he’s gone for long periods of time. That’s when her workaholic tendencies come back with a vengeance. Matt and Foggy always know when “Pete” (her small concession to them, telling them the name of her beau. Not technically a lie, since Frank’s alias still holds up, thanks to both Micro and Dinah Madani) is out of town for “work”, because that’s when Karen and Max start to pretty much live in the office.

She thinks of Maria, Lisa and Frank Jr. a lot in those moments. How hard it must have been to have Frank be so far away and for such long periods of time. She often talks to Maria in her head in Frank’s absence. She feels a connection to her. A sense of duty. _I promise I’ll take care of him until he’s with you again, Maria._ She’s not religious, but she has to believe that Frank will see his family again one day. That she’ll get to see Kevin when her time comes. That maybe, all of them can find some sense of rest together.

Overtime, Karen makes a few changes to her apartment. She wants it to be a place of solace for Frank. She buys sleek and cool to the touch bamboo sheets. She replaces all her towels with white ones, so she can bleach the blood off of them, erasing any mementos of violence when she’s done nursing his injuries. She buys him pajama pants and t-shirts made of the softest, most comfortable fabric for him to lounge in. She makes sure to always have his favourite brand of coffee in her pantry. She wants him to feel good in every possible way when he’s by her side. She needs to make sure he’ll always want to come back to her. To come back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to do due diligence and to make sure to give credit where credit is due:  
> The Alchemist is a book by Paul Coelho.


	3. Chapter 3

_Karen gets dressed, then walks over to the night stand to pick up the pair of bracelets she leaves there at night. She runs her finger inside the gold one, to feel the inscription of the inside before slipping them on her wrist. A little ritual of hers. She then goes back to the kitchen and pours some coffee in a to-go mug, before noticing something that has escaped her earlier, when she was still a bit sleep dazed. Frank has circled two weeks in red on the magnetic calendar they keep on the fridge. It’s next month, then. She smiles, then calls Max over to put on his harness and leash, and off they go…._

_____

Frank and Karen have been together for more or less a year and a half when Matt and Foggy figure it out. Or rather, when Matt and Foggy fess up that they already know who the mysterious and elusive Pete is.

She oversleeps one morning when Frank is away, having been plagued all night by nightmares brought on by the anniversary of the attack on the Bulletin, only getting any semblance of rest after 3 am, when she caved and let Max in the bed (something Frank is resolutely against, but he’s been gone nearly two weeks, apparently cutting a swath through a drug syndicate all over New Jersey, from what she can deduct from the news, so he doesn’t get a say). It’s Max that wakes her up past 9 am, whining very loudly by the door, needing desperately to get outside to answer the call of nature.

She knows he can’t wait anymore, so she grabs clothes that had been discarded near the hamper, not paying attention to what they are, only meaning to walk her dog and come back home and log on to work from her apartment. But as fate would have it, no sooner is she back in her place that her phone rings. It’s Foggy, she brought home a file he and Matt absolutely need for an important meeting with a client at 10:30 today, and _Where the hell are you, Karen and when will you get here_?

Karen panics. She feeds Max, then grabs the file and her purse, and is out the door, unshowered and in clothes she basically picked off the floor. She’s an absolute mess, but she figures she’ll hand the guys their file then go hide in her own office, door closed, until all clients have left the premises. She has no meetings of her own today anyway. 

She runs into Nelson, Murdock and Page at around 10:20, drops the file on Foggy’s desk, beelines to her office, and shuts the door. She uses her pocket mirror to try to fix up her hair a bit, and puts on some lip balm, but she still looks like a crazy lady. A hungry, uncaffeinated crazy lady. She tries to work, but really, she’s just waiting for the moment she’ll hear her business partners shake hands with their client and see him out to come out and get some food and coffee from the tiny kitchenette they managed to set up in a corner of the common room.

The client leaves around 11 : 30, and finally Karen can come out of hiding, dazed in a way that only a full blown coffee addict who hasn’t had their fix can be.

“Good morning, Karen! Thank you for joining us… and for dressing up for the occasion, apparently,” Matt teases. Karen, searching for her mug, can only muster a grunt and a limp flip of the bird in his general direction. When she turns to face her partners, she notices a strange expression on Foggy’s face.

“What?”

“Is that… a Punisher t-shirt?”

Karen looks down at her outfit and finally realises exactly what she is wearing. They’re basically the rags she wears to clean up or do messy chores around her apartment, and they include a t-shirt with the painted skull Frank wears on his vest – a gag gift from the Liebermans (since Karen is Frank’s number one fan girl, har har har) that embarrassed Frank deeply, but that Karen did find amusing enough to hold on to, without ever intending to wear it in public for a myriad of different reasons.

Before she can formulate an answer, Foggy continues.

“Does Frank ask you to wear that to bed?” he asks, and Matt punches him in the arm, telling him he can’t ask things like that.

Karen just stares at them,

“What did you just say?”

“Matt doesn’t want me repeating it.”

“That name, why did you say that name?” The look on both Matt and Foggy’s faces is the only answer she needs.

“You… you know!” Karen says, suddenly struggling to breathe. She feels her knees buckle under her, but Matt catches her and leads her to a chair, asking Foggy to get her something to eat.

“Your blood sugar is low,” he says in a concerned tone, but Karen is too busy trying to avoid having a full blown panic attack to marvel at Matt’s supernaturally sharp senses for the hundredth time.

Foggy returns with a banana, a granola bar, and, like the angel he is, a cup of coffee, at long last. They both insist she eats before she talks, so there is an awkward moment where Karen eats in silence, while Matt and Foggy simply sit just as quietly on either side of her.

She takes a few sips of her coffee before asking:

“How?”

It turns out, Foggy started suspecting something when Pete’s absences seem to coincide awfully often with news reports about dead mobsters and biker gang members, as well as eyewitness accounts of people claiming to have spotted the Punisher on some rooftop or in a dark alley.

Eventually, Matt was able to confirm Foggy’s suspicions when he himself came across the Punisher one night and, even from afar, immediately recognized “Pete”, Karen and Max’s mixed scents on him.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Karen whispers. _Why is my name still on the office door? Aren’t you mad at me? Disgusted by me? Why haven’t you told me to get out and never come back?_

“Because we understand why you didn’t want to tell us,” Foggy sighs. “You said it was complicated and private, and we wanted to respect that.”

Karen feels tears prickling her eyes.

“What happens now?” she asks.

“Nothing. Look, neither one of us is going to pretend that we understand, or approve – not that you need our approval – but I think with everything we’ve been through these last few years, we’ve all learned we’re better off accepting ourselves and each other as we are, rather than let our differences of opinion separate us,” Matt says, holding her hand between his. “I’ll never be a fan of Frank or his methods, but I’m willing to steer clear of him for your sake.”

“Yeah,” Foggy chimes in, we’re not about to take your boyfriend out for drinks, but we want you to be happy, even if – and I say this with love – we both think you’re completely nuts. You can’t scare us away that easily.”

And that’s it, that’s what breaks the dam of Karen’s tears. She starts sobbing uncontrollably, the stress of eighteen months spent worrying that one slip of her tongue was going to bring everything crashing down around her once more, that the happiness she had found with Frank would eventually cost her the two people she has started to think of as her family, suddenly lifted from her shoulders.

When she throws her arm around them, she can see that both Matt and Foggy are a bit teary eyed too.

“You tell Frank Castle if he hurts you, Matt will totally find him and kick his ass,” Foggy whispers in her ear.

At that, Karen starts laughing through her tears.

“Will do.”

When Frank comes back a few days later, he immediately senses something different about Karen. She explains about Matt and Foggy, and he cradles her face between his hands, looking into her eyes.

“So that’s what it is… you look like you just had a huge weight lifted off your shoulders, sweetheart.”

He kisses her forehead.

“I still think that t-shirt is stupid, though,” he mutters, making her laugh.

At one point, Karen starts getting daily tension headaches that no amount of Tylenol or Excedrin can seem to cure. Frank massages her neck and her scalp to try to help alleviate them whenever he sees her rubbing at her temples miserably. After nearly two weeks of this, he asks her when was the last time she took a vacation. It takes Karen a minute to think of the answer. She has taken zero time off since the creation of Nelson, Murdock and Page. She took no vacation in the two years she was at the Bulletin, or back in the days when she was an office manager for her current partners. Doing the math, she realises that she hasn’t taken any time off work in five years (unless you count the time she spent trying to evade assassination attempts on her person post-Bulletin, but she keeps that thought to herself to avoid upsetting Frank, who always gets very worked up about the whole Fisk-Poindexter fiasco and his absence during these events).

“Ok, that’s it, I’m getting you the fuck out of town as soon as I can,” Frank declares. “Tell Nelson and Murdock you’ll be cashing in on your vacation time in the next month or so.

While Karen’s first instinct would normally be to object to being ordered around, the thought of enjoying a getaway out of the city with Frank is too tempting to elicit any form of protestation whatsoever. She doesn’t care where they go or what they do, so long as it’s just the two of them and Max, away from Hell’s Kitchen and its problems. She wants it so bad she can taste it.

Three weeks later, Karen, Frank and Max get into Karen’s car and head to Maine, where Frank (who has managed to grow an impressive beard in the last month) has rented a cabin by a lake under the name “Pete Castiglione”.

They pick up some groceries in the small town nearby before taking the small dirt road in the woods that will lead them to the cabin. Karen rolls down the windows to let the fresh forest air in the car, and Max automatically sticks his head out of the window, tail wagging like crazy. She can already feel herself relaxing. After taking a fork in the road, they get to their destination. Karen gasps. What Frank had described as a cabin (and that she had pictured as a shack in the woods) is actually a full blown cottage. They get inside, and it’s just too perfect for words. The place is fairly big, old, but very well maintained, has huge windows with a gorgeous view of the lake, and access to a fully furnished, screened-in covered porch. The furniture inside is mismatched and well worn, which makes the whole place seem even more inviting.

“What do you think?” Frank asks, coming back behind her to slip his hands around waist and kiss her neck.

“It’s amazing. I can’t believe we get to spend two weeks here. This place must cost a fortune! You didn’t have to go through all this expense, I would have been happy just camping in a tent or...”

Frank snorts, cutting her off. “Crime pays” he jokes, referring to his habit of pocketing a large portion of the cash he takes from the criminals he takes down. “Might as well spoil my girl a little.”

Karen is in heaven. They spend their vacation lazing about the cottage. In the morning, they make love with the blinds wide open, letting the sun warm up their skin through the window. They swim in the lake, dry themselves on the dock, cold beer in hand, while watching dragonflies buzz around. Frank, cooks a lot, taking full advantage of the BBQ grill outside. They go fishing on the lake once, and catch some trout, which they cook over a fire and eat with boiled potatoes drenched in melted butter. It feels like a feast. They watch Max go crazy chasing butterflies and laugh to tears when their big, mean looking pit-bull runs to them for protection from a frog that jumped too suddenly for the city slicker dog he is.

The rare rainy days are spent reading in the covered porch, listening to the rain fall on the roof and on the vegetation all around. Dusk often finds them sipping whiskey while listening to the loons. After dark, they watch fireflies dance around, or sit by a fire, or go star gazing, lying down on the deck.

The stove top is equipped with a griddle, so one morning, Karen gets up early to surprise Frank by showing off her breakfast making skills. For the first time since Kevin’s death and her banishment from Fagan Corners, she prepares what they used to call “Penny’s Special”: eggs, bacon and sausages, with a generous stack of her mother’s blueberry pancakes. Karen is pleased to find that she stills remembers the recipe by heart, and that the pancakes taste exactly as she remembered.

Their two weeks just fly by, and it’s with a heavy heart that Karen starts packing their stuff the day they have to leave. Before they walk out the door, Franks stops her and gathers her hands in his, before bringing one of them to his lips. “Hey… What do you say we make this a yearly tradition, huh?”

Karen readily agrees. Imagine that, Frank Castle making plans for next year. Planning, _hoping_ to stay alive so they can have more of this. She doesn’t know if he realises how much that means to her.

They end up making it a bi-yearly tradition, in the end. Two weeks every summer, plus one week every winter, when they trade lake swims for hikes on snow shoes, camp fires under the stars for cuddling in front of the fireplace and cold beers for hot cocoa spiked with rum.

Over the years, life back in Hell’s Kitchen gets easier in some small ways. After their first vacation together, Frank gets into the habit of growing his beard whenever things get quiet and he spends a longer stretch of time at Karen’s, which transforms him enough to give them the freedom to get out a bit more. It also helps, that, in the course of his years as the Punisher, Frank has also directly or indirectly saved the lives of several business owners in the neighbourhood, who feel quite a lot of gratitude towards him. For example, on Karen’s birthday one year, Frank takes her out to this amazing Korean restaurant, where the owner lets them in through the back door and leads them to a private reception room at the back. Turns out, Frank saved her from being raped and most likely killed by a gang of bikers as retribution for refusing to pay them a “protection tax”. Frank had turned down the offer of eating free for life at the restaurant, but had asked about maybe being afforded discretion and privacy if he did show up one of these days.

They get a similar deal at small family owned Italian restaurant, and one day, Karen’s money mysteriously becomes “no good” at her favourite bakery.

It was too good to last, of course. Shit hits the fan one year, with a close call that brings Karen very close to having her entire life crumble around her. Brett Mahoney drops by the office unexpectedly one night as Karen, Foggy and Matt are burning the midnight oil. He’s come to warn Karen that there are rumours around the precinct that the Punisher has been spotted around Hell’s Kitchen quite a bit, and that some small time criminal has been talking about a certain building he frequents a lot. Before Karen can pretend not to know why Brett thinks this news might be interesting to her, Brett warns her:

“If I were Castle, I’d make myself scarce for a while. Get out of town. And if I were someone else, I’d make sure not to risk being seen with him. You never know who’s watching.”

Brett gets up and heads for the door. “I was never here.”

Once the door shuts behind him, Karen finds the burner phone at the bottom of her purse and does what she hoped never to have to do. Shaking, she texts Frank the code saying he has to stay away from her place.

She gets an email a few days later. Frank has skipped town, and is now in Florida visiting Amy, whom he has been checking on regularly over the years, but whom he hasn’t seen in person since putting her on that bus. He’s worried about Karen though, cautions her to never go anywhere without her gun, and to go stay somewhere else, maybe even join him in Florida, for a bit. Tempting as that may be, Karen knows that she is probably already being watched by the NYPD by now. That’s who she’s worried about, far more than the ramblings of a small time drug dealer already in custody. If she joins Frank and Amy, she’ll probably lead the police right to them. Suddenly deciding to stay somewhere else will also seem suspicious. She has to go on as if she's oblivious to being surveilled, as if Brett didn’t take a huge, potentially career-ending risk by warning her.

Matt, however, agrees with Frank (and Karen can’t resist making a big show of checking the sky for flying pigs upon hearing that): Karen should not stay alone (“If one criminal knows about you and Frank, others probably do as well”), and he wants her to come stay at his place for a bit. When Karen explains why this is a bad idea, he suggests a compromise. He’s still concerned about potential criminal elements having identified her as the Punisher’s girl, so he’ll come stay with her a few nights a week, to lend her his ears for a bit, but also to try to throw whoever might be watching off her scent. At the very least, if the NYPD thinks they are dating, maybe that will get her off their radar.

Karen hesitates, but ultimately agrees. And it works. Matt is able to confirm that the police is indeed watching her. It takes nearly three months, three awkward months of walking around holding Matt’s hand, of Matt spending several nights a week on her couch when he’s not planning to go out as Daredevil, three months of pretending she is not missing the man she actually loves with every fiber of her being, three months of being asked repeatedly by both Matt and Foggy if this is worth it, if loving Frank is worth all this (it is) before Matt is able to confirm that she and her building are no longer being watched by anyone.

But the tension permeating the air during these three months ends up triggering a chain of events that culminates in Marci finding out about Pete’s real identify and about Matt’s alter ego, and nearly breaking up her engagement to Foggy over the whole thing. This puts a huge strain on the three business partners’ relationship. Fortunately, after two very difficult weeks where it seems that Foggy’s saintly patience with his friends’ respective secret lives has finally run out, Karen is able to get through to Marci. Over a few bottles of wine, she commiserates with her about how shitty and humiliating it feels to have been lied to and kept in the dark, about how fucking complicated the entire vigilante issue is at its core, about how you can understand why a loved one hid such a big secret from you, while simultaneously being so hurt you feel you never want to see them again. They mostly talk about Matt’s secret, really, and what it’s been like for Foggy. Karen does not go much further than her usual “He’s not who they say he is” explanation when it comes to Frank. This isn’t about her, after all.

Marci thankfully does come around and forgives Foggy, as well as Matt and Karen, though she does tell the latter that she liked it better when she was convinced that Karen was the secret mistress of some really powerful married man or Hollywood celebrity rather than knowing that she’s “banging the Punisher,” to which Karen, while mildly hurt, can only reply by shrugging her shoulders. Morality, she has found, can be quite relative, especially when there are vigilantes and feelings involved.

When Frank comes back, she has not seen him in four months, and she cries with relief. He looks pretty shook himself, and he actually spends the next week following her from room to room almost constantly whenever she is home, as if he can’t bear to be away from her for even five minutes. Karen has always been fiercely independent, but she doesn’t mind it. She gets it. Four months was way too long, and this call felt way too close.

After that, she packs a quick exit bag. Micro procures her fake documents. She’s ready to follow Frank wherever at a moment’s notice should their bridges one day be all burnt. She hopes she never has to use it, but she feels better for having it.

Their life resumes as it was before. They hang out with the Liebermans more and more, and Karen finds a true friend in Sarah, the only woman she can confide in when it comes to her love life. Marci and Karen have actually gotten closer, but they are not there yet, and probably never will be. Marci has never met Frank, understandably refusing to compromise herself in any way should he one day get caught. Besides, it’s not like Foggy is begging them to go on double dates either, anyway.

One Christmas, five years since Frank showed soaking wet at her window and ended up taking her against the wall, he presents her with a velvet jewelry box. When she opens it, she finds two bracelets nestled side by side in it, one made of white gold, the other one made of yellow gold. They are so simple, yet so beautiful.

“They, uh, they reminded me of you,” Frank says. “Karen Page: spine of steel, heart of gold,” he adds with a crooked smile. His words leave her speechless. She knows he loves her, but hearing him describe her like that, knowing that this is how he sees her, makes her feel cherished beyond measure. Never mind that it might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her.

“There’s an inscription on the inside of them.”

Karen removes the bracelets from the box with shaking hands. The yellow one says “Two hands”, while the other says “Never let go”. She’s already all teary eyed by the time he gets to his knees and pries the bracelets from her hands to slide them on her wrist himself.

She knows what he means by this, what he’s telling her with this gesture. But then he surprises by actually voicing it too:

“I’d marry you in a heartbeat if I could, you know that, right?”

“I do now,” she says in a trembling voice, smiling through her tears. “And I’d say yes,” she adds before bringing his face to hers to kiss him with every ounce of love she feels for him.

Life goes on. She never leaves her place without her bracelets clinking against one another on her wrist. Frank eventually gets a tattoo of two side by side bands running around his wrist to match.

Foggy and Marci finally get married. Matt is best man, and Karen is a groom’s lady. The two of them hide together with a stolen bottle of champagne during the bouquet and garter toss. It’s a blast, and Karen’s face hurts from smiling so much at Foggy’s happiness. When she gets home that night, Frank is immediately on her to rip off the stylized suit she wore instead of a dress. It was a choice she had made in order to stand out a bit less by Foggy’s side, next to Matt and Theo, but when he saw her get ready for the wedding, Frank told her she’d stand out even more like this, because she looked hot as hell. Karen doesn’t bother pretending she’s not tickled pink knowing she can still elicit such a reaction from Frank after more than six years together.

And that just how their after goes. It’s about peaceful moments shared together, secret and discreet symbols of commitment and making it work in a way that suits them. It’s about making the most of what you have, while you have it, knowing it could get ripped away at a moment’s notice.

But Karen can’t help herself: when she starts seeing more and more grey appear on Frank’s temples and in his beard, when she notices that some laugh lines on her face are becoming a bit more pronounced, and sadly, when Max starts having a bit more difficulty going up and down stairs as arthritis starts to take hold in his joints, Karen lets herself dream. Maybe this isn’t their “after” at all. Maybe this is just their _in between_. Maybe their after will truly begin when Frank’s body forces him to slow down, eventually quelling the blood lust in his soul. Maybe he’ll bury the Punisher for real once the ache in his bones requires him to find more gentle ways to deal with the ache in his heart. Maybe that’s when they leave the city for good, and Karen trades her pencil skirts permanently for flannel and jeans. She pictures Frank and her together, their hair turning more silver every year, with two or three dogs, living peacefully in a place not too different from the cottage they escape to twice a year. Maybe that’s when Frank takes up wood carving or something. Maybe she tries her hand at writing a book. Who knows? Anything is possible in this vision of another possible after.

But for now, whether the present is their in between or their after is irrelevant. They’re alive. They’re together. They’re holding on to what they have with both hands. And they’ll never let go.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Phew! It took me longer to complete the first chapter of this than it did to write all of Seasons! Writer's block is a bitch. Chapter 2 should be up next week, though. My muse is no longer on strike.
> 
> I want to give a special shout out to the amazing TheVampireCat, who posted this right around the time I was struggling with my fic:  
> https://thevampirecat.tumblr.com/post/184090270152/its-the-first-defeat-it-cuts-you-to-your
> 
> By pure coincidence, she created this amazing piece of art that fits the first kiss scene in my story to a T. Great minds think alike, it seems.


End file.
